Search engine marketing (SEM) is a form of Internet marketing that involves the promotion of websites by increasing their visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs) primarily through paid advertising.[1] SEM may incorporate search engine optimization (SEO), which adjusts or rewrites website content and site architecture to achieve a higher ranking in search engine results pages to enhance pay per click (PPC) listings.[2]
While the title tag is effectively your search listing’s headline, the meta description (another meta HTML element that can be updated in your site’s code, but isn’t seen on your actual page) is effectively your site’s additional ad copy. Google takes some liberties with what they display in search results, so your meta description may not always show, but if you have a compelling description of your page that would make folks searching likely to click, you can greatly increase traffic. (Remember: showing up in search results is just the first step! You still need to get searchers to come to your site, and then actually take the action you want.)
Although online marketing creates many opportunities for businesses to grow their presence via the Internet and build their audiences, there are also inherent challenges with these methods of marketing. First, the marketing can become impersonal, due to the virtual nature of message and content delivery to a desired audience. Marketers must inform their strategy for online marketing with a strong understanding of their customer’s needs and preferences. Techniques like surveys, user testing, and in-person conversations can be used for this purpose.

FGM Internet Marketing, LLC is a digital marketing and web design company based in Columbia, SC. We have over a decade’s worth of experience working on local, national and international online marketing campaigns, but our passion is helping local businesses grow. FGM Internet Marketing’s suite of online marketing channels will make your business more visible on the web, increase traffic to your website, and convert this into leads and sales.

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An analytics platform will give you the best overall picture of your important data and where it comes from. The good thing about these platforms are how they’re able to tie all your marketing efforts together — your advertising, your social posts, your referral sources, even audience demographics and more. These simplify tracking efforts and put all your data conveniently in one place. There are tons of analytics tools, but here are our favorites.

In addition to giving you insight into the search volume and competition level of keywords, most keyword research tools will also give you detailed information about the average or current estimated CPC for particular keywords are. This is particularly important for businesses with smaller ad budgets and this feature allows you to predict whether certain keywords will be truly beneficial to your ad campaigns or if they’ll cost too much.

The question isn’t whether to use video in your marketing strategy, it’s how. Marketers are faced with so many distribution channels, and it seems the game is always changing. How can marketers keep up? First, YouTube surpassed the popularity of live television, and now the big, flashy report is that Facebook has 4 billion video views each day and may be stealing YouTube’s throne right out from under the video site.
5. Link building. In some respects, guest posting – one popular tactic to build links, among many other benefits – is just content marketing applied to external publishers. The goal is to create content on external websites, building your personal brand and company brand at the same time, and creating opportunities to link back to your site. There are only a handful of strategies to build quality links, which you should learn and understand as well.
Using an omni-channel strategy is becoming increasingly important for enterprises who must adapt to the changing expectations of consumers who want ever-more sophisticated offerings throughout the purchasing journey. Retailers are increasingly focusing on their online presence, including online shops that operate alongside existing store-based outlets. The "endless aisle" within the retail space can lead consumers to purchase products online that fit their needs while retailers do not have to carry the inventory within the physical location of the store. Solely Internet-based retailers are also entering the market; some are establishing corresponding store-based outlets to provide personal services, professional help, and tangible experiences with their products.[24]

That's what kept bringing me back to Sharpe. When it comes to internet marketing, this is one of the masterminds in the industry, a high-8-figure earner who recently generated over $1 million dollars within a 60-day period with a brand new system. I knew that if I was going to help educate people about internet marketing, I had to go straight to the top. Sharpe is also one of the most relatable characters in the industry, who speaks eloquently and fluidly, able to inspire millions of people with ease.

Social Media Marketing (SMM): Focuses on branding, reputation enhancement and enhanced customer service via social networks like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn. Smaller SMM channels include Digg, Delicious, Wikipedia, StumbleUpon and MySpace. Social networks are visited by a collective total of over one-billion people. Thus, even the simplest marketing efforts, like paid advertising, reach potentially large audiences.

Keyword analysis. From nomination, further identify a targeted list of key­words and phrases. Review competitive lists and other pertinent industry sources. Use your preliminary list to determine an indicative number of recent search engine queries and how many websites are competing for each key­word. Prioritize keywords and phrases, plurals, singulars and misspellings. (If search users commonly misspell a keyword, you should identify and use it). Please note that Google will try to correct the term when searching, so use this with care.

While the title tag is effectively your search listing’s headline, the meta description (another meta HTML element that can be updated in your site’s code, but isn’t seen on your actual page) is effectively your site’s additional ad copy. Google takes some liberties with what they display in search results, so your meta description may not always show, but if you have a compelling description of your page that would make folks searching likely to click, you can greatly increase traffic. (Remember: showing up in search results is just the first step! You still need to get searchers to come to your site, and then actually take the action you want.)

Your first opportunity to delight comes directly after the purchase. Consider sending a thank you video to welcome them into the community or an onboarding video to get them rolling with their new purchase. Then, build out a library of educational courses or product training videos to cater to consumers who prefer self-service or simply want to expand their expertise.

As you’re planning your entire production, from creative ideation to actual video distribution, you should have a timeline to stick to. You should actually have multiple — overall timeline, production timeline, distribution timeline, and more. Your timeline serves as your guiding light, keeping you aware of how much you’ve done and what’s left to do.
You know who and where your best customers are — Bing Ads lets you choose when and how to reach them. Control where your ads appear by city, state, country and worldwide. Fine-tune your targeting even further by setting the time of day to display your ads and on which devices. By targeting only your most relevant customers, you can reduce unnecessary spending.
With video content marketing, businesses find that certain metrics used to determine the success of web campaigns improve drastically. Dwell time is the most obvious, as engaging video content will likely keep visitors around for longer. 57 percent of retail brands said they notice average order values increase when users watch just one video they’ve produced and sales totals double when people have watched 10 or more videos.
Finally, it’s critical you spend time and resources on your business’s website design. When these aforementioned customers find your website, they’ll likely feel deterred from trusting your brand and purchasing your product if they find your site confusing or unhelpful. For this reason, it’s important you take the time to create a user-friendly (and mobile-friendly) website.
Whether you’re looking for more impressions, more views, increased conversion rates, increased engagement, better rankings, better brand awareness, recognition, and recall—or you just want your online viewers to get to know your company from a different perspective—getting video marketing services from a reputable video marketing agency is a smart bet.

Conversion rate optimization is still possibly one of the most underutilized but critical functions of digital marketing. Every element of digital marketing is useless without considering conversion rates. This goes for SEO, SEM, Social Media, Email, and Display. The power of your SEO rankings are only as good as your click through rates and your traffic is only valuable of your website and landing pages foster some type of “action.” Why spend all the time and energy driving traffic through multiple different channels if you are not willing to spend the time and energy on conversion optimization? Yet many brands and agencies still put less emphasis on this crucial piece of the puzzle.

Digital marketing became more sophisticated in the 2000s and the 2010s, when[13][14] the proliferation of devices' capable of accessing digital media led to sudden growth.[15] Statistics produced in 2012 and 2013 showed that digital marketing was still growing.[16][17] With the development of social media in the 2000s, such as LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, consumers became highly dependent on digital electronics in daily lives. Therefore, they expected a seamless user experience across different channels for searching product's information. The change of customer behavior improved the diversification of marketing technology.[18]

Owned distribution is always a must, though, since you own and have complete control over these channels. There’s the lowest barrier to entry here and they also have the most opportunity due to how many different options for distribution you have. If one form of owned doesn’t work, another surely will. And, if your goal is to capture leads, using your owned channels is especially crucial.
Another good news is that your videos don’t have to be perfect. It’s the content that matters! Latest research shows that users are mostly put off by videos that don’t explain the product or service clearly enough. Low quality and poor design didn’t matter nearly as much. So it’s fair to say that video is like pizza – when it’s bad, it’s still pretty good!
A product videoExtended ArticleWhy a Product Video for Your Ecommerce Company is NecessaryPicture this: You’re looking for a new electric bike online, and you find what seems to be the perfect one for a fraction of… Read More tells your audience about your best-selling products or services and their top features. It shows your product in action and helps increase consumer confidence in your company or brand.

When one of our clients wanted a video to explain the process of installing some HVAC equipment, we created this video to debunk a somewhat confusing process. Instead of continuously fielding the same questions about what to expect, how long the process would take, and any necessary preparations they needed to complete in advance, they decided an explainer video would be a more convenient and memorable way for clients to find and reference the answers to their questions.

Okay. Okay. There is a lot to learn. However, everyone has to start somewhere. If you're just being introduced to internet marketing, and you've become bedazzled by the glitz and the glamor of the top online income earners, know that it's not going to be easy to replicate their success. Be sure that you set your expectations the proper way. As long as you stay persistent, you can achieve your goals of generating healthy amounts of money online without becoming the victim of a scam.

Testimonial videos are one of the strongest types of videos Extended Article11 Powerful Customer Testimonial Videos Done RightPicture This You’re a small business owner and you’re trying to nurture your leads into becoming customers. You’ve already attracted an audience, engaged them on… Read More you can make; they show past or current satisfied customers talking about their positive experience using your product or service.

Professional cameras, like DSLRs, give you fine control over the manual settings of shooting video and allow you achieve the shallow depth of field (background out of focus) that people rave about. While they’re primarily used for photography, DSLRs are incredibly small, work great in low light situations, and pair with a wide range of lenses — making them perfect for video. However, DSLRs do require some training (and additional purchases) of lenses.

Although this video is about a man who adopts and raises a puppy, it's not meant to be inspiring -- it's meant to be entertaining. And entertaining it is: BuzzFeed did a great job writing a script that takes all the classic puppy stories you've heard (puppy chewing on the furniture; puppy keeping you up all night) and turns them into a delightful story of a man and his dog spending time together.
The largest search engines, Google, Bing and Yahoo, each have fairly simple programs to get started. You determine the key words or search phrase as well as the amount you are willing to spend (per click and/or per day). Most of them offer simple programs that require filling out a form and putting a certain amount of money down as credit. Like anything new, start small with paid SEM and add complexity (and budget) as you learn more and see results over time.

To avoid undesirable content in the search indexes, webmasters can instruct spiders not to crawl certain files or directories through the standard robots.txt file in the root directory of the domain. Additionally, a page can be explicitly excluded from a search engine's database by using a meta tag specific to robots (usually ). When a search engine visits a site, the robots.txt located in the root directory is the first file crawled. The robots.txt file is then parsed and will instruct the robot as to which pages are not to be crawled. As a search engine crawler may keep a cached copy of this file, it may on occasion crawl pages a webmaster does not wish crawled. Pages typically prevented from being crawled include login specific pages such as shopping carts and user-specific content such as search results from internal searches. In March 2007, Google warned webmasters that they should prevent indexing of internal search results because those pages are considered search spam.[45]

In addition to helping you find keywords you should be bidding on, thorough keyword research can also help you identify negative keywords – search terms that you should exclude from your campaigns. Negative keywords aren’t terms with negative connotations, but rather irrelevant terms that are highly unlikely to result in conversions. For example, if you sell ice cream, you might want to exclude the keyword “ice cream recipes”, as users searching for ice cream recipes are unlikely to be in the market for your product.
Okay. Okay. There is a lot to learn. However, everyone has to start somewhere. If you're just being introduced to internet marketing, and you've become bedazzled by the glitz and the glamor of the top online income earners, know that it's not going to be easy to replicate their success. Be sure that you set your expectations the proper way. As long as you stay persistent, you can achieve your goals of generating healthy amounts of money online without becoming the victim of a scam.

The next step? How will you communicate with people. Sharpe says that you need to decide on this early on. Will you blog? Will you use social media? Will you build a list by working with solo ad providers? Will you place paid advertisements? What will you do and how will you do it? What you must realize here is that you have to get really good at copy writing. The better you get at copy writing, the more success you'll find as an internet marketer.

There are many reasons explaining why advertisers choose the SEM strategy. First, creating a SEM account is easy and can build traffic quickly based on the degree of competition. The shopper who uses the search engine to find information tends to trust and focus on the links showed in the results pages. However, a large number of online sellers do not buy search engine optimization to obtain higher ranking lists of search results, but prefer paid links. A growing number of online publishers are allowing search engines such as Google to crawl content on their pages and place relevant ads on it.[16] From an online seller's point of view, this is an extension of the payment settlement and an additional incentive to invest in paid advertising projects. Therefore, it is virtually impossible for advertisers with limited budgets to maintain the highest rankings in the increasingly competitive search market.
For content to stand out, businesses must differentiate their material from other companies, especially competitors. Some methods that have worked are innovative series that develop fictional characters or storylines centered around a specific product. Other campaigns serve essentially as commercials for a business, such as Red Bull’s campaign that features extreme sports athletes, or serve as how-to’s that establish thought leadership.
This commercial focuses on a little boy in a wheelchair who's excluded from everyday activities, like playing basketball with other kids in the neighborhood. One of these kids meets the boy in the wheelchair and creates a basketball game just for him. Although Canadian Tire barely brands this adorable video, it shows its support for Canada's Olympic Team such that anyone can empathize with it, while subtly calling back to its product (wheels) at the same time.

Goals and Objectives. Clearly define your objectives in advance so you can truly measure your ROI from any programs you implement. Start simple, but don’t skip this step. Example: You may decide to increase website traffic from a current baseline of 100 visitors a day to 200 visitors over the next 30 days. Or you may want to improve your current conversion rate of one percent to two in a specified period. You may begin with top-level, aggregate numbers, but you must drill down into specific pages that can improve products, services, and business sales.

Your viewer is now an actual customer! Your goal here revolves around keeping them interested in your brand for future purchases or added value. Any video that delights is a success — and the longer they watch, the more likely it is they’re delighted. The tone of your video here will matter greatly. Chances are a long, boring educational video won’t delight your customers as much as a funny, short, social media video will. Keep this in mind when reviewing your data: The view-through rate of a 15-second video will likely be much higher than that of a two-minute video.
There is a heap of sales clutter on the Internet that is actively annoying and repelling your customers. Don’t let your brand be that guy – instead, your video should be centred around the story and not the sale. Remember: the same rules that apply for written content marketing apply for video marketing – concentrate on the value you’re providing for your customers.
In the beginning, it was rough for Sharpe. No one out there should think that it's going to be easy whatsoever. His journey took years and years to go from an absolute beginner, to a fluid and seasoned professional, able to clearly visualize and achieve his dreams, conveying his vast knowledge expertly to those hungry-minded individuals out there looking to learn how to generate a respectable income online.
For instance, the Pew Internet & American Life Project has demographic data that suggests individuals between the ages of 18 and 33 are the most likely to use mobile Internet technology like smartphones and tablets, while the “Gen-X” demographic of individuals who are in their 30’s and 40’s are far more likely to seek out information through their laptop and desktop computers.(See also Targeted Marketing)
Email marketing is the practice of nurturing leads and driving sales through email communications with your customers. Like social media, the goal is to remind users that you’re here and your product is waiting. Unlike social media, however, you can be a lot more aggressive with your sales techniques, as people expect that email marketing will contain offers, product announcements and calls to action.
A strategy that is linked into the effectiveness of digital marketing is content marketing.[39] Content marketing can be briefly described as "delivering the content that your audience is seeking in the places that they are searching for it".[39] It is found that content marketing is highly present in digital marketing and becomes highly successful when content marketing is involved. This is due to content marketing making your brand more relevant to the target consumers, as well as more visible to the target consumer.
The development of digital marketing is inseparable from technology development. One of the key points in the start of was in 1971, where Ray Tomlinson sent the very first email and his technology set the platform to allow people to send and receive files through different machines.[8] However, the more recognisable period as being the start of Digital Marketing is 1990 as this was where the Archie search engine was created as an index for FTP sites. In the 1980s, the storage capacity of computer was already big enough to store huge volumes of customer information. Companies started choosing online techniques, such as database marketing, rather than limited list broker.[9] This kind of databases allowed companies to track customers' information more effectively, thus transforming the relationship between buyer and seller. However, the manual process was not so efficient.
The other thing that will set the mood for your entire production? Physical styling, including makeup, wardrobe, props, and set decorations. Whether you go big or go small, these things will communicate the bulk of your story. You should iron these out in the creative planning stages, though the specific details and purchases can come later. But how your video looks can deeply affect its success, so make sure your stylistic choices match the story you’re telling and your ultimate marketing goals.
Think about the words that a user might search for to find a piece of your content. Users who know a lot about the topic might use different keywords in their search queries than someone who is new to the topic. For example, a long-time football fan might search for [fifa], an acronym for the Fédération Internationale de Football Association, while a new fan might use a more general query like [football playoffs]. Anticipating these differences in search behavior and accounting for them while writing your content (using a good mix of keyword phrases) could produce positive results. Google Ads provides a handy Keyword Planner34 that helps you discover new keyword variations and see the approximate search volume for each keyword. Also, Google Search Console provides you with the top search queries your site appears for and the ones that led the most users to your site in the Performance Report35.